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RBL 06/26/2000 Martin, Dale B. The Corinthian Body New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp.

xx + 330, Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0300081723.

Daniel Boyarin University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720

Dale Martin's general methodological approach lies at the cutting edge of studies in religion. By this I do not mean that he is prey to some sort of trendiness but that he is aware of how the latest and best thinking about cultural and social process necessarily impacts our understanding of religion as a historical phenomenon. His intellect is of a sort that is able to assimilate this critical thinking (sometimes broadly called "theory") and make excellent use of it in producing serious, convincing interpretative advances that ought to be persuasive by and large even to those who are not schooled in the very interdisciplinary discourses that Martin has assimilated. Moreover, his use of the language of social and cultural thought, while not jargon-ridden, will at the same time enable access to his work and its importance by other scholars who are not involved in NT, or even religious, studies. Many such scholars will find his work vitally important for the research that they are conducting within their own disciplinary formations and textual interests. Martin's new book is in an important sense a continuation of the project of his first book, Slavery as Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). In that book, he addressed an important hermeneutical issue in Pauline interpretation for which Corinthians is a central crux, namely, whether or not Paul should be taken as desiring social change and liberation or as a force for conservatism and the retention of hierarchical structures of domination. As Martin points out, the figure of the slave appears in every one of the Pauline epistles. It is, therefore, a centrally important textual

This review was published by RBL 2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.

moment and exposing more of its intertextual determinations should be central for understanding Paul's discourse as a whole. From the point of view of Pauline interpretation, what was significant about slavery was the fact that the socially relevant opposition was not slave/free as we would imagine it but rather a complex social system within which a slave could sometimes have a higher status than a free person. The parade example of this phenomenon would be the slave of a very high-status figure over against the poor but free laborer. Furthermore, within the category of slave, status differences depended not only on the status of one's master but also on the type of work that one did. Martin successfully demonstrated in his closely argued and very learned book that all of these factors must be taken into careful consideration in order to make any sense of Paul's usages of slavery as metaphor for salvation. Becoming a slave of Christ, according to this convincing interpretation, involved not so much the moral behavior of self-renunciation (agapic giving for others) as the entrance into a "higher" status, to be slave of the highest ranking Master of all. Martin went on to demonstrate how interpretations of this metaphor would have been different associated with people from different socioeconomic situations within the Corinthian church, plausibly mapping these onto the distinction, explicit within the Corinthian correspondence, between the Strong and the Weak, thus extending Gerd Theissen's insights considerably. Martin has thus begun a major new project in the social interpretation of the Pauline letters, locating their central gospel in the overturning of the hierarchies of the social world around them. This interpretation, which is, to the best of my knowledge, quite new, significantly advances our understanding of Paul's discourse. Martin's new book on The Corinthian Body continues the strengths of his first book and hones the skills and methods further. Once more, we find here an extraordinary combination of NT exegesis with an extremely erudite reading of Greco-Roman cultural materials relevant to that exegesis. On this occasion, the subject is the body as it is manifested in 1 Corinthians. The book represents not only a major contribution to knowledge but also an exemplary instance of method that will serve as the focal point for future productions of knowledge. One of the remarkable aspects of this book is the way that Martin builds upon his previous study with respect to the various responses of different members of the Corinthian community to the same rhetorical forms, depending upon their "class." (I place the term "class" in quotation marks to indicate that Martin is not, in any sense, a doctrinaire or vulgar Marxist.) In the previous book, the distinction was between the way that the upper class (the "Strong") reacted to usages of the slavery metaphors in distinction to the reaction of the lower classes (the "Weak"); in this one, the even more subtle issue is the differing constructions of the body in these two groups.

This review was published by RBL 2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.

After an absolutely illuminating discussion of different philosophical positions vis--vis "dualism" in antiquity, Martin goes on to elaborate how different parts of Greco-Roman society would have held different views of the body owing to their level of education in philosophy. To demonstrate his arguments, Martin reads everything relevant, from medical textbooks to Stoic philosophers, from magical papyri to ancient novels. The following is an example of both the surprising insights of Martin's writing and its graceful style. After describing how, according to the physician Soranus, the nurse was meant to mold the body of the newborn, Martin writes, "Clearly, 'natural' here has nothing to do with the way a body might grow if left to 'nature.' What is 'natural' is the body that fits the esthetic expectations of the upper class. One must, therefore, gently coerce the body into its 'natural' form." I cannot resist the temptation to cite one more example of a brilliant formulation: "By retaining the power to define beauty, status, and nature, the upper class maintained its position as the Creator of the Greco-Roman body." Were I given to exaggeration, I would suggest that this is a statement of which Foucault would not have been ashamed. All in all, Martin, of all Pauline scholars I have read in the last several years (and I have read many), seems best to have truly assimilated the Foucauldian lessons about the radical difference between antique and modern discourses of the body. One could even say that he is writing the volume on early Christian texts that Foucault intended to, but never did, write. Now the implication of Martin's argument on slavery and its development vis--vis the class structure of Corinthian society leads to the conclusion that the major impetus of Pauline thought is a deconstruction (I use the term advisedly; it is not Martin's) of binary oppositions through a reversal of hierarchy. Thus slave becomes the valorized term in the opposition slave versus free. On the issue of gender, however, Paul notoriously (after some more radical moves) seems to reinvoke and reinforce the traditional hierarchy. Martin proposes a brilliant new suggestion to explain this inconsistency, an explanation that does not involve us, for a change, in vaguely antisemitic notions of Paul's inability to escape his "Jewish background" just on this point. His explanation is rather that Paul was grounded here by and in the most universally held convictions about physiological differences between male and female bodies; the difference finally between the oppositions Jew/Greek and slave/free on the one hand, and male/female on the other is that the former two are understood as fully social distinctions while the latter is biological and thus immutable in its conditioning. Martin's thesis that the central moment in Pauline thought involves a kind of deconstruction of the binary hierarchies of the world provides a significant key to the reading of Pauline thought and imagery in general, and in particular the skandalon that is the crucifixion. Always the "problem" of the crucified Messiah stands at the focal point of Paul's texts (and thus implicitly of any attempt to understand them globally), and Martin so patiently and fully elaborates the contexts within which this scandal functioned

This review was published by RBL 2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.

as scandal, and the messages that Paul and his hearers derived from it, that with The Corinthian Body we enter a new era of understanding.

This review was published by RBL 2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.

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